2023-08-10 07:07:28
Earendel. For connoisseurs of the work of JRR Tolkien, this name evokes a character from Silmarillion who has a jewel as bright as a star. It is also the name given to WHL0137-LS, the most distant individual star ever observed to date. We owe its discovery to the Hubble telescope in March 2022. Now, the James Webb space telescope has taken over and, thanks to its formidable infrared observation capabilities, provides more precise information on Earendel.
This star shone in the earliest times of the universe, regarding 900 million years following the Big Bang. It took 12.9 billion years for the light from Earendel to reach us. If we take into account the expansion of the universe, the star is 28 billion light-years from our planet.
Hubble was able to spot Earendel thanks to the phenomenon of gravitational lensing, in which the gravity of a massive object in the foreground acts like a lens by warping the fabric of space and time, bending and brightening the light coming from a more distant body when this light passes nearby.
Earendel is a million times brighter than the Sun.
James Webb also exploited this phenomenon to observe Earendel last summer. Thanks to its data, we now know that it is a B-type star. more than twice as hot as our sun and regarding a million times brighter “says NASA. Another key piece of information, the colors of Earendel suggests that it is accompanied by another star ” colder and redder ».
On the strength of these discoveries made possible by James Webb, astronomers are cultivating the hope of one day being able to detect the first generations of stars, those which gave birth to the universe during the Big Bang and with which everything began.
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